Windows Server Installer :: Modular & Scripted

[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by kuahara

Will do that. Thanks.

I understand that most of the time it probably doesn't matter. This morning, it was noticeable because I was having trouble with my connection (ISPs end) and wound up having to reset their equipment, which I think is failing and in need of replacement. Actually... that's not a very convincing argument that things would have been different if I had a local address specified. I'll play around with it.


Thanks again.

Hmm? Not sure I'm understanding.

Either way I hope you got it sorted sir

[kuahara]

Does it matter where in the eqeqmu_config.xml file that <localaddress> tag goes?

Also, do you know of any reason my spells or dbstr files might not be correct? I referred to your response in another thread where you told someone to run

export_client_files .\exports

to acquire those files. I've done this and it spits out the 4 files I'm expecting. When I drop these in my eq folder, the behavior I observed was what I might expect if the spells file was wrong. When I right click a gem in game, the spell categories all read "unknown DB string xxx" and so did all the subcategories. If I follow the menu path down to the spell itself, the spell names were fine. Just the categories leading to them all say that. Issuing a /who command in game returns good information for all but the player races. Races still come up "unknown DB string xxx".

Yesterday, that was all fine and good. It didn't stop me from playing the game, but today I'm just experiencing one crash after another. I can get my GM character into the world, but after a minute or so, it crashes. When I pick items up from my inventory or from the equipment slots on the character, they never appear on the cursor. The game partially behaves as if the item is there, but never does what it is supposed to do when I try to re-equip it, drop it into an inventory slot, etc... and then I crash a second later. If I try to use #zone, I crash. Yesterday, I did not have these problems.

Am having all the trouble in the world resolving this today. Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks.




Edit: restarting the server partially resolved this. I'm not crashing anymore and I can pick up items. Still can't figure out the unknown DB string non-sense, though.

Edit2: The crash and cursor issues seem to be specific only to MQ2 + GM Characters. If I start MQ2 and log in using a GM, I can't pick up items anymore. The items disappear. /gate #zone, etc... will crash the GM. Also using F1 to target self with the GM character logged in will crash the GM toon if MQ2 is running. I can log a regular toon in while MQ2 is running and pick up items, /gate, /zone, etc... just fine.

Edit3: Ok... so what I've determined with the GM account is this: If MQ had been running at any time on the client PC, even if I turn it back off before I log in a GM account, all of the problems with picking up items, targeting self, and crashing recur. Even with MQ turned off, if I log in a GM account and hit F1 to target self, I can cause an immediate crash. This issue does not go away until I restart the server (t_stop_server, not actually rebooting the VM my server runs in). Once I restart the server, if I leave MQ turned off, I can log in a GM, target self, pick up items, etc... This is not too big of a deal. I just need to remain aware that there are certain things the GM simply can't do. I can still utilize him for all my GM needs #leveling toons, #gi , etc... MQ2 and regular players all seem to work as intended.

Out of all this, I'm still most interested in trying to resolve the unknown DB string business. Forgot to mention that when I click the Alt Advancement button, I can't see what AAs I'm purchasing either. Those all say "Unknown DB string xxx" as well.

[kuahara]

Update: fixed the "Unknown DB string xxx" problem. I wound up using the server files from agnarr-eq.com

I thought I'd tried the dbstr and spells_us files already (I use the underfoot client), but there were also 2 files that needed to go into the resources folder. I don't remember doing anything that would have changed these from when I actually played on the agnarr emu server, but apparently something was changed along the way. Using all their files with the exception of eqhosts.txt resolved the issue I was having.

Also, someone messaged me and said that MQ2 discussion might not be permitted. My apologies. I thought it was condoned here since most of the servers allow it with varying sets of rules to make multiboxing easier.

I also stuck <localaddress>ip</localaddress> just below <loginserver2></loginserver2>. Will give that a try and report back.

Edit: Was trying the <localaddress> thing because after a while, my response time with the server increases from 30ms to nearly 30,000ms (full 30 second delay). I usually have 21 characters logged in. This happened even with the <localaddress> bit in the eqemu_config.xml file in the place I specified above. The response time sits at about 100ms with 21 toons logged in, but after a while, will suddenly start climing from 100 to 900, then 1500, 5000, 19000, and usually stop climbing somewhere between 27000 and 29000. I am not sure if I am triggering this problem or not. The last time it happened, I had just issued an MQ2 command on the GM character. This could have triggered it or it could have been nothing but a coincidence. Won't know without experimenting further. Just updating here in case someone already has an answer.

Edit2: I issued a /bcaa //gate command to make 20 toons all try to gate at once. Usually this is broken in such a way that it just causes the toon to rezone to the current zone in the current location. The idea was to make them all rezone and see if that fixes the problem with the long response time to/from the server. For some reason, on the bards (bound in gfay by default), /gate actually works and sends them to gfay. All toons that were bound in PoK by the soulbinder were kicked to the server select screen when I did the mass gate. The bards wound up in gfay with 30ms response times from the server.

This is also taking up quite a bit of memory. I am not sure that that would contribute to long response times, but when I had 21 logged in, I noticed my machine was using 26.5GB of memory. I have 32GB in this machine. The server runs in a VM on the same machine. Most of the eqgame.exe instances are using about 732MB of memory. EQ instances only account for 15GB of the memory being used. The rest is other garbage running on the machine (firefox, excel, vmware, etc...) The CPU (an i5 @ 3.4GHz) is not being beaten to death or anything. With a toon zoning here and there, I was seeing 15-24% usage.

[Akkadius]

Unknown DB string is going to show up depending on the types of data you're dealing with on older clients.

if you want to minimize string related issues on the client side I would suggest using ROF2

You can grab a clean version of ROF2 and use its spells_us and dbstr files to import to the server before you try exporting. The database tables are not guaranteed to be up to date.

And yes - this is not really the place for MQ2 support - there is mqemulator.net for that.

Memory footprint from the emulator is not going to be that large

[kuahara]

Not sure if it matters, but this happened when I started the server back up after the update. Not sure it effected anything as I was able to log my GM character in immediately after without any trouble. Just fyi.





Edit: Checked my eqclient.ini and Log=FALSE

[kuahara]

I've had 13 existing toons parked in PoK since my last post over an hour ago. I created 11 new toons since then and have used the GM to summon some of them around. So far all their response times with the server are 30-45ms. 25 toons online and so far no sudden jumps to 5k, 10k, 20k or 30k ms.

Only new thing right now is that I can log in literally every toon except the reserve clerics. Trying to log just those toons in is causing them to autocrash for some reason, but it's probably just a bit of bad luck at this point.

If the issue recurs, I'll post back. Though I'm not sure what else can be done at this point.

I ran that continuous ping for a while, both before all the toons were online and after. Nearly all replies came in 11ms or less. One stray packet was responded to in 383ms. I'd expect that with the server running in a VM, the replies come in 1ms or less. I administer a small Windows domain at work that has about 60 machines in it spread across two buildings. As I write this message, I VPN'd into my work network, RDP'd into my work PC, then pinged a machine in the building across the street. The response times were 4ms, 3ms, 5ms, 3ms. When I ping the gateway (same building, but opposite side of the building), all replies are <1ms.

Here on my home PC, the server and clients are literally the same machine, one is just in a VM. Not sure why I can't get <1ms replies when I ping.

Pings to the gateway, which is physically separate, come back in <1ms.

If I fire up wireshark, is there some EQ specific traffic I can look at and see if that <localaddress> tag in eqeqmu_config.xml is doing what it's supposed to do or if the traffic is still being routed through the outside interface?



Edit: Every time I think I know something....
So I started having the issue with high response times again, but now I'm guessing it has something to do with what I'm doing for new toons. I have a hotkey setup on the GM to level it to 60, increase all the skills to max, hand it some plat, turn on GM speed (temporarily), give it a bunch of AA, etc... I'd moved the new 11 toons to PoK and hadn't had an issue. Unless I just needed to wait a minute for it to kick in after moving so many so quickly. As soon as I started smacking the hotkey to scribe all spells for each of the new toons, I started having this problem, so I popped open a cmd terminal and....




Also, I'm not convinced that it's the server. I left 1 toon in Neriak and his response time in game shows 31ms. I summoned him to PoK with the GM and upon zone in, he's showing 25.4k ms. Took him quite a while to zone in too.

[kuahara]

Is there any way to undo the update of those binaries? Because ever since I updated them, none of my characters can log in while MQ2 is running. If I shut it off, they can all log in fine. If it's on, they all crash trying to enter world now.

[kuahara]

ok, so I figured it out! I'm guessing my replies aren't being looked at in this thread anymore, but I'll update for the heck of it.

It probably seems obvious at this point, but I can reproduce the problem at will now. I didn't realize I was completely running out of memory. I thought I still had a pretty safe buffer. When I am nearly full and start another EQ instance, all the times shoot up from the 20-40ms range to 500+ and start climbing to nearly 30k.

I also want to point out that I created a new server using Windows Server 2008 R2 instead of Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2008 seems waaaayyyyyyyy more stable. I don't have half the problems I was having in 2012 and my setup/installation procedure was exactly the same. (only this time I took several VM snapshots in case anything breaks and I need to go back to a stable state).

Earlier, you mentioned that EQ shouldn't have this large of a memory footprint. Any chance you know how I might go about reducing the amount of memory each instance is using? Here's a screenshot of what my host machine performance looked like while everything was stable. And things were stable all day yesterday, all through the night while I slept, all morning. But at 31.5GB usage when I start a new instance and load up that last toon to push it over the edge. All in game response times shot as described above.



And here is a snapshot of the processes, showing how much memory each instance is using. How can I reduce this?


You also mentioned something to me about possibly switching to ROF2 client and I noticed you made that recommendation to several others as well. If possible, I'd like to keep the underfoot client. It has been very stable when playing on the existing EMU servers and I like the version of MQ that I have that runs with it. MQ is causing none of these problems by the way. eqgame.exe is using about that much memory even with MQ turned off. I'm afraid that if I switch clients, I might lose some of the useful plugins that I make regular use of and playing without MQ just doesn't work for me. I'd rather quit.

If you have any advice, I'd love to hear it. Going to google this problem for now.

Thanks.



Edit: That large CPU spike you see in the first screenshot is not normal CPU usage. I just happened to be loading up another instance when I took it. Idle, the CPU sits anywhere from 4-15% depending on what it's doing, even when I have 20+ toons logged in.

[Akkadius]

You're asking me how to reduce memory footprint of your client and heaps of other questions that are now outside of the scope of this thread. Some of which I've already answered

There are MQ2 builds for ROF2 they may not have your active hacks (warping etc.) but they are there at mqemulator.net

ROF2 is a much better client and far better at memory management. You can probably find it in a big red button on PEQ's website

Please start a new thread and we'll go from there - everyone on this thread chain gets notified via E-Mail

[kuahara]

If this isn't an appropriate place for me to follow up, just delete this. It's possible I'm the only idiot that would do something like this without realizing the consequences, but I wanted to follow up anyway in case someone else ran into it.

A huge part of my memory consumption wasn't just the eqgame.exe instances. Task manager on the host machine won't show it, but if you run a server in a VM and allot it 16GB of memory, it will (at least with this sql db running) consume the entire 16GB even when it doesn't actually need it. The guest taskmgr shows it only needed 2GB of memory, but with the VM powered up, I was losing 16GB.

Fortunately, the solution is simple. I just powered it off and lowered it's available memory to 4GB, and restarted. I was operating under the assumption that the VM would only use what it needed and was trying to play it safe.

Also, I tried ROF2. It does save me about 200MB on the first few instances, but the drawbacks weren't beneficial enough for me to switch away from UF.


Thanks for all the help and sorry for the mess.

[phentop]

Using this installer - If something goes wrong with the build, How do I create a new build?

Basis for question. I created a server with bots. When I started the server I got a lot of errors saying my bot files were out of date. Once they were "auto updated" the zones loaded. I could see the server I created in the server list but when I tried to log in all I got was a black screen for about a minute and was kicked back to the EQ start screen. Instead of messing with it I tried to create a server without bots using the same installer but all I get are errors and hang ups. If I completely format my drive - reinstall windows - and restart the server installer, the installer will work and create a new sever file. I know their has to be an easier way to do this besides reinstalling everything to get a clean version of windows running.

[phentop]

Re-installed everything on a clean copy of windows. Without adjusting any settings, but the server name, I still cannot log into the server.

I show no errors. No crash. The server is listed in the server files as open to join.

I've used this installer in the past and it worked flawlessly.

I just downloaded this installer after wiping my drive and have run into this issue. I've tried entering the server from different EQ versions and different computers. Same issue. When entering the server I never get the loading screen - it stays black for about 30 sec then kicks me to the login screen.

I can log into other servers just fine, just not the one I created of this installer.

[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by phentop

Re-installed everything on a clean copy of windows. Without adjusting any settings, but the server name, I still cannot log into the server.

I show no errors. No crash. The server is listed in the server files as open to join.

I've used this installer in the past and it worked flawlessly.

I just downloaded this installer after wiping my drive and have run into this issue. I've tried entering the server from different EQ versions and different computers. Same issue. When entering the server I never get the loading screen - it stays black for about 30 sec then kicks me to the login screen.

I can log into other servers just fine, just not the one I created of this installer.

To be clear: this is a windows install with both the client you are trying to login with and the server running on the same instance?

[phentop]

Windows 7 64bit
Server is running on a separate PC than the one I run EQ on.

Only odd thing I see that didn't happen a few months ago when I ran a server off of this installer is when world.exe runs I see "New zone Server connection from.... at 127.0.0.1:...." about 30 times in a row. I don't recall seeing this in the past. Maybe I didn't pay attention until it didn't work though.

I however, am able to log into the server from the computer the server is running on. I still cannot log into the server from a different computer.

[phentop]

I found the issue.

My Firewall was still blocking "world" in the InBound rules. Once I set it to allow, all worked as it should.

Thank you for responding so fast Akkadius.